


Not Like We Bleed

by saferbet



Category: Original Work
Genre: Depression, Gen, POV Second Person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-02
Updated: 2016-05-02
Packaged: 2018-06-05 22:54:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,334
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6726664
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/saferbet/pseuds/saferbet
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You tell yourself that you aren't waiting for the phone call.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Not Like We Bleed

You aren’t sure what wakes you. Maybe it’s the almost imperceptible sound of their breathing. Maybe it is in the vague shift of every particle of every molecule of air in the room altering to accommodate their quiet presence. Or maybe it is just the fact that it is irrefutably unimaginable by this point that you would ever, could ever, be capable of remaining unconscious when they are not okay. It’s feels like perhaps it is their silent distress - the answering ache echoing in your body - that awakens you. You open your eyes and they are there like you knew they would be; a darker shade of indistinct blackness in the deep night. You know it’s them though. They could never be indistinct to you, could never be anything but known. 

In that way that you have always known exactly what they need from you, be it to have a beer or hear a joke or just be held, you instantly know that something is very wrong. You push up and reach blindly for the light switch, finding it immediately - sense memory. You have lived in this house for so long now that you can virtually feel it, can easily navigate it in the dark. You know they can too. They hadn’t woken you entering the house, tripping over the nesting tables in the hall or standing on the creaking floorboards like you recognize they should have done. They might not have a key but you are both very aware that this is more of a home to them than any other place they have ever known. 

They haven’t been here in weeks. 

The light is sharp and sudden, shocking. The intense brightness dazzles you so badly that you can no longer see them. You squint against the bitter stab of shooting pain as your eyes adjust and you try to find them again. You feel inexplicably panicked like maybe you only dreamt them, like maybe they only exist in the dark. You are irrationally terrified that they will have vanished in the illumination in the same way that the momentary intangible thing that catches in the corner of your eye is unaccountably absent in the instant that you attempt to fathom it. You are left with that mislaid sense of tender almost, that twinging not quite, until you are forced to disparage all thoughts of barely there, of the achingly esoteric, and to carry on as though you never missed the indeterminate something that you desperately wish you could have been fast enough to catch.   
When you open your eyes, they’re still there. They’re there and they’re real and it’s a relief that feels like breathing. For a moment that is all you know, all that matters or could ever matter. They are there in front of you, you know this, you know it, and yet in the glare effect still lingering from the light you see a hundred different versions of them superimposed all at once. You have spent the last few weeks playing out moments of your shared history over and over on a reel in your mind. 

You have spent the last few weeks telling yourself that you aren’t waiting for the phone call, telling yourself this again and then once more but every time the dust catches in a sunbeam just so, you see the afterimage of their smile, their bright eyes squinted against it and the sun playing patterns across their cheeks. Every time you catch the smell of heat on concrete with the air thick with imminent rain you think that you can feel their ghost in those transient seconds before it starts to fall. Every time you turn the radio on in the car you look over to smile at them, expecting a caustic diatribe about the corporate pop industry only to find an empty seat. Every single time. Every time you smoke a cigarette you think about the deliberateness of their hands, the delicate grace of their fingers. And every time that you are awoken by a siren you’re there in the ambulance, crying and begging and pleading and promising everything for them to just please not die. Every time and you are there for The Second Time, answering the phone and hearing they’d done it again and could you please come to the hospital as soon as possible. Every fucking time you hear a siren, every time the phone rings, every time you wake up and they aren’t sleeping on your couch or drinking too strong coffee at your kitchen table and no one has seen them for weeks and you don’t know how to find them anymore, where they hide, and you are scared. You’re so fucking horribly scared that there is no The Third Time - that when the phone rings again it will be the police, it will be could you please come and identify the body. You really don’t think you could. You’re really damn sure that you don’t want to find out. 

They take a breath and it shakes, brittle and much too loud in the reticence they have created. You blink. They are standing before you - they are not in a sunbeam or the smell before rain, or the back of an ambulance saying the words I’mSorryI’mSoSorry again and again until they blur together, lose meaning, become a rolling, muddled, desperate prayer or plea or renouncement that you are so in love with because at least that means they are still conscious, still breathing. You decided that you hated silence on that second Tuesday of September four years ago; The First Time. - They are in front of you now and their skin is too faded pale, their dark hair too stark a contrast tangled and messy hanging in their eyes in that way that makes you want to lean over and brush it back. Their eyes are wide and surprised, blinking against the light but more focused than you had allowed yourself to hope. They are shaking, shuddering tremors that roll in waves through their markedly gaunt body. You’re heart aches tiredly for the slight puppy fat they’d had as a teenager, before they’d grown into jagged edges and I’mSoSorry.

At some point you become cognizant of the fact that their knuckles are bloodied but it’s abstract, it doesn’t really register. You feel like you’ve been removing the blood from their knuckles for so long now that you have become desensitized to it, not impervious or unfeeling, but just so horrifically aware that there are far worse things possible to them showing up in your bedroom with bloodied scrapes or bruises that it is almost a sick reprieve. You finally catch their eye and they are looking right at you like they can still remember their own name and yours and all the reasons why they are here and that too is so much of a relief to you. 

You open your mouth before you really know what it is that you want to verbalise. It doesn’t matter anyway. All those unformed shapeless words you have to say catch up in your throat, piling together and crunching into painful twisted contours like the metal body of their car that time they collided with a wall, crashing it straight into brutal desperate carnage, beyond any chances of salvation or survival.

“I’m leaving.” They confess in sudden whisper that is barely more than a hushed breath yet still somehow sounds a lot like the resounding crack of the gunshot as the bullet leaves the chamber. You aren’t sure if it’s in the way it splinters through the muted choke of the room or if it’s in the abruptly exquisite way it impacts your body, the sudden intense velocity that slams all the air from your lungs, suffocates you. 

“Don’t.” You gasp, strangled by your entreaty. “Don’t.” You repeat. You are pleading, begging with your very last breath, tortured and choking on it because you can’t fucking breathe past this. You can’t. You just want their smile, you want them sleeping on your couch, you want their haughty derisive humour and their easy laugh. Fuck it you want them even when their eyes can’t track, when they are throwing up on the bathroom floor and are so far gone they can’t even speak. You want their I’mSoSorry because at least that way you still have hope that they are going to be okay. You have never stopped believing that. You can’t. You can’t ever stop having faith that this is somehow going to be okay.   
Their face crumbles but they don’t look away. “This town is killing me.” They confess and you can’t decide if it’s supposed to be a justification, exoneration, or if maybe it’s the honest, confused, sacrosanct desire for some kind of atonement. A peace they’ve been craving in the itch beneath their skin and the blood that still persists - just won’t stop - pumping through their veins. You both know that it’s the truth, it’s in the ambulances and the blood on their knuckles and the way their body shakes. 

“Where will you go?” You ask because you are helpless, because there is nothing you can do for them. Because you haven’t been enough to pull them through for a long time and you can hate that, you can fight it and rage against it and scream and shout and beg and cry but you can’t save them. Only they can do that and maybe, maybe this time, they will.   
“California.” They say in the same way they might say God or Salvation or Still Breathing. Still Fighting. Still Here. 

And then, “It’s where everyone goes right?” And it sounds sarcastic, satirical and faithless and so painfully them, but somewhere underneath that you think that can hear the faint tendrils of hopefulness, of persistent, illogical, optimistic faith. It’s in the faltering edge of a smile plays briefly on their lips and you can’t help but to cling to that. To believe in this battered, almost ironic, self-aware reverie of theirs. 

“California.” You repeat and it sounds the same on your tongue, sweet like deliverance, of sublime redemption or a reverent promise of aggrieved liberation. Neither of you have never been to California. You think of beaches and an eternal, unquantifiable ocean that you have never seen. You think about consoling heat and how, even here, they always turn their face up to the sun. They shiver and shake and shudder in the dispassionate chill and you understand this because you understand them and neither of you could bear for them to die somewhere cold. You understand why they can’t stay even if it hurts for them to go. 

“I’ll be better.” They say, amend, “I want to be better.” And for the first time you believe them, for the first time you think do too. “I’m going to stop.” They tell you and you really want it to be true. “I don’t want to live like this.” Again they stop, make sure they are being more true, always so honest, heart on their sleeve where it can be battered and bruised and damaged beyond repair but still so honest. “I don’t want to die like this.” They admit finally. 

You know it hurts them. You know that they can’t help but to be so fucking hurt by everything they see, everything they can’t change and can’t accept. That they don’t know how to stop fighting against the world, how to get along, haven’t ever been able to since you can remember. The only kid you’ve ever known to habitually cry at the news, to be shaking and scared and not knowing where they are and still clinging to you about how they are scared for all the teenagers growing up in this world, how they are afraid of how complicit they are in all of the atrocities, the brutal rigorous structure of violence and dominance in everything from education to office jobs to prisons to drone strikes. You have never been able to make them understand that sometimes the only thing fighting means is holding on, is surviving. 

They smile at you for the first time in far too long a time now and something that you didn’t know was holding too tight breaks in your chest and you can breathe again. “I’ll even buy a phone and I’ll call you on it. We’ll sit by the water and we’ll be okay.” You recognise this hollowly fanciful dream for what it is, false and illusory. Less of a promise than just different words with the same significance, the thing they’ve been saying to you over and over, I’mSorryI’mSoSorry. Words that they’ve been saying all their life. Before the phone call, before the ambulance. Words of guilt and shame and horror that you really hope they no longer need to repeat once they are in California. 

You hug them before they leave because you know you have to, even if it breaks your heart you can’t not. You hold them close for long minutes and you feel the beat of their heart like the beat of your own and you are so unwilling to let them go. You need the solid reassurance of them beneath your fingertips, need the sinews of muscle and the warm comfort of breakable skin to truly be able to ascertain their existence. You need it. You need it. You can’t let go. You’re not ready. 

Somehow though you do, you do. With stinging tears in your eyes and your too mouth full up of the promises you know you can’t ask them to make, you let them go.   
The silence that fills up the room, forcing into the spaces they have left like a physical assault, is desolate and portended. 

You might tell yourself you aren’t waiting for it, but when it comes - less than a week later- you aren’t even surprised. The silence is finally splintered by the discordant scream of the phone call.


End file.
